RMS Expands Support for Emerging Asian Insurance Market with New Catastrophe Risk Models

Newark, Calif. – July 9, 2007 – Risk Management Solutions (RMS), the world’s largest provider of products and services for catastrophe risk management, today announced the launch of several new models for the emerging Asian marketplace. These products – the
RMS® China Earthquake Model, RMS® India Earthquake Model, and RMS® Japan, Taiwan, and China Earthquake Casualty models - were developed to support insurance and reinsurance companies as insurance penetration and property, life, and personal accident portfolios grow, and they diversify risks in the emerging markets.

“The highly detailed hazard and vulnerability components of our new emerging market models allow risk managers to make underwriting decisions and country-wide portfolio analyses using the same modeling platform,” said Jason Futers, vice president and Asia market practice lead at RMS. “The increasingly global nature of the insurance and reinsurance business demands this type of sophisticated natural catastrophe risk assessment. Earthquake risk is of particular concern since this low frequency but high severity hazard threatens a significant portion of urban Asia.”

China Earthquake Model
China has significant earthquake risk, with almost half of the population located in areas identified as moderate to high seismic hazard. As such, the first product RMS has released for the country is the RMS China Earthquake Model, capable of assessing the seismic risk to property across Continental China, including Hong Kong, and Macau. The model incorporates a simulated set of approximately 85,000 earthquake events.

Through a partnership with China’s Institute of Engineering Mechanics (IEM), the RMS modeling team was granted access to local knowledge on seismic sources and ground motion, unique data on soil classification/liquefaction potential, and computer models of local building types. The rich detail of this data, combined with a proprietary RMS geographic indexing system, allows seismic risk to be analyzed at a high resolution.

India Earthquake Model
The RMS® India Earthquake Model marks the increased importance of the Indian market as a growth area. Originally launched in December 2006 as an aggregate model, a new detailed model is now available at a time when the insurance industry in India is experiencing a period of rapid transformation: premiums are experiencing rapid growth, and in January 2007, a new de-tariffed regime came into force.

The RMS® India Earthquake Model includes some of the latest modeling methodologies, allowing detailed location analysis, and country-specific vulnerability curves that incorporate the lessons from the recent damaging events of Gujarat, 2001, and Kashmir, 2005.

Japan, China, and Taiwan Earthquake Casualty Models
The RMS® Japan, China, and Taiwan Earthquake Casualty models expand upon the peril models developed for these regions to allow for the assessment of earthquake-related injury and mortality. The models consider several different factors, including number of people exposed, severity of ground shaking, vulnerability of the structures, and potential for secondary hazards such as fires.

These earthquake casualty models use seven different injury states to classify injury severity, which are then translated to currency loss estimates. This functionality makes it possible to support a range of loss calculations appropriate for life, health, personal accident, and other types of insurance.

The RMS® China Earthquake Model, RMS® India Earthquake Model, and RMS® Japan, China, and Taiwan, Earthquake models were launched with version 7.0 of the market-leading RiskLink and RiskBrowser modeling systems on June 20, 2007.